Beyond the Bell: A Green Day
NYSE Euronext hosts a meeting of the minds on sustainability.
Courtesy NYSE Euronext
The focus at the New York Stock Exchange on April 22 was green, but not the kind of green usually associated with the buying and selling of securities. In recognition of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, NYSE Euronext (NYX) and the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute hosted the Exchange’s first Green Summit, a day for corporate executives, government policymakers and academics to collaborate on eco-friendly initiatives. The gathering “serves as a great reminder of the need to address the issues that affect our planet and the opportunities to make our world even better in the future,” NYSE Euronext CEO Duncan Niederauer said in his opening remarks.
Co-sponsors included CNBC, which is part of NBC Universal, a segment of General Electric Co. (GE); Deloitte LLP; The Dow Chemical Co. (DOW); Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ); Office Depot Inc. (ODP); PepsiCo Inc. (PEP); The Body Shop International PLC; Mother Nature Network; Sesame Workshop; and United Parcel Service Inc. (UPS). Yale Senior Associate Dean Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a conference organizer and panel moderator, said: “There was a sense of authentic cross-sector excitement about this conference. You would not have seen the same innovative solutions unifying economic development and environmental sustainability during the first Earth Day celebration.”
MORE ON THE GREEN SUMMIT
Sustainability on Display
Wayne Balta, IBM Corp.’s (IBM) vice president of corporate environmental affairs and product safety, noted how far corporate America has come on the issue of environmental responsibility, recalling the first Earth Day in 1970. “The focus was on control, with the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act,” Balta said. “Today it’s not just control — it’s also about innovation and how we can collectively innovate.”
“If you can inspire people, those policies will be more successful.” — Steve Odland, Chairman and CEO, Office Depot
Throughout the day, Sonnenfeld said, “engineers, environmentalists, community activists and marketers were sharing ideas. There were no ideological battlefields.”
Waste Management Inc. (WM) CEO David Steiner enjoyed the give-and-take. “It’s comforting to know that other very smart businesspeople are struggling with the same challenges,” he said, after discussing how Waste Management is helping Wal-Mart Stores Inc. (WMT) achieve its goal of zero waste by taking part in Walmart’s Sustainability Consortium (see nysemagazine.com/walmartconsortium for more). “Business is good, and we are planning for a future where we see growth through managing the materials that flow through our waste stream.” (For details, visit nysemagazine.com/wastetowatts.)
CEOs listed specific policies — like Office Depot’s effort to recycle 80 percent of the products it uses internally in three years — that have resulted in tangible differences for their companies. Those policies and standards, CEOs noted, were internal programs initiated by management. “Nobody wants to be forced to do things,” said Steve Odland, Office Depot’s chairman and CEO. “If you can inspire people, if it comes from within, those policies will be more successful.”
Linda Fisher, chief sustainability officer for DuPont (DD), added that the real win will be when sustainability is embedded within the business and you no longer need a CSO.
